The Woman in the Trunk

There were no guns here. I had one at home. We had them at the bakery. Both legal and not-so-legal thanks to the nature of my father's connection to the mafia. But I would never leave a gun in a house that was rarely occupied. And the place was sparsely decorated after my father sold off a lot of the collectibles his parents had once filled the space with.

There was nothing.

Except...

Oh, thank God for drinking yourself to sleep, I decided as I realized the clunky, thick, glass whiskey bottle was on the floor beside the bed. Likely just out of sight. If he got close, I could reach down, grab it, bash him with it, then get away.

"Don't scream," a deep, gravelly voice commanded. It shouldn't have sounded sexy given the circumstances, but it did somehow.

"Fuck you," I said with a scoff, opening my mouth to suck in some air, deciding that this was the perfect time for a horror movie scream queen impersonation. The houses were practically stacked on top of each other this close to the shore. Someone would hear me. Someone would call the cops or come running. Something.

But before I could even finish pulling in that breath, this giant of a man was across the small space, his hand grabbing my ankles, yanking me down onto the mattress, allowing his other hand to clamp down over my mouth. I'd never really had the occasion to notice the size of a man's hands before, but with one covering damn near all of my face, I was noticing his. As well as his dark eyes, and the juts of his cheekbones. And what looked like maybe a scar down his eyebrow? It was hard to see with just a glint of moonlight coming through a crack in the curtains.

"Don't make this more difficult than it has to be," he demanded, using his free hand to reach down.

I couldn't see what he was reaching to do. But it didn't seem to take a lot of thought. Men didn't break into the room of women while they were sleeping to offer them pamphlets about our Lord and Savior.

They were there to lay claim to the canvas of your body, to splash it in shades of red, to make what was once something safe and beautiful, foreign and scary and ugly.

I knew.

God, did I know.

And I would be damned if I ever knew that again.

I was small. I knew this. I got confused for a child more than once a week. I had to provide several forms of ID to get into clubs. I was short and slight and I wasn't exactly a big fan of lifting weights, so I wasn't all that strong either.

But women could lift cars off babies.

I could fight off this man to save myself from rape.

Decision made, my feet lifted as my brain scanned through memories of the self-defense videos I had watched online when I was younger, both legs widening like a butterfly's wings before ramming outward, slamming into the man's hips, catching him off-guard enough to stumble back a foot.

Only a foot.

But a foot was all I needed.

I scrambled down off the bed, hand closing around the neck of the bottle, turning it, then rising up, swinging back, and slamming it forward, cracking it more off the side of the man's neck and jaw than head seeing as I wasn't tall enough to get higher.

"Fuck," he hissed regardless, head jerking back as I shoved past him, feeling his hand grab my wrist. Hard. Hard enough to bruise, making me whirl around, hand shooting out, nails bared, to scratch across the exposed skin of his neck.

"Jesus Christ, hellcat," he snapped as I yanked my wrist free, turning, mind set on running, getting out the front door, onto the street, finding some help. This town went to sleep late in the summer. Someone would be lingering around somewhere.

It would be okay.

I would be okay.

It was only a couple yards to the front door.

Heart hammering, brain swimming, muscles feeling foreign and shaky, I barreled through the bedroom doorway and into the hall.

Smelling freedom, I made a beeline for the front door.

Only I forgot one thing.

The goddamn braided rug that was set in front of the door. The same braided rug that had been there my entire life. The same braided rug that had always been a safety hazard, since no one ever bothered to put a pad beneath it to prevent movement.

I realized my mistake the second my front foot landed on the oval rug, and my forward-moving momentum made it slip backward even as my body kept moving forward, sending me flying.

I knew the second it happened that I wasn't going to go down, hit the floor, maybe be quick enough to brace myself on my forearms—not my hands, never the hands. No. There wasn't enough floor space left.